was addressed St. Paul's Epistle to the Thessalonians;
while the Servians had captured Monastir, one of the most important
centers in Macedonia, and the Bulgarians had driven the Turks almost to
the famed city of Constantinople. The Servian soldiers finally marched
to the Adriatic sea, and Albania raised a flag of its own and asked
Austria-Hungary and Italy to recognize its independence and grant it
protection.

Within little more than two months Turkey had been deprived of the
greater portion of her possessions in Europe and a treaty of peace was
signed between the allied countries and the Turks. By this agreement
Albania became in effect a suzerainty, protected by Austria. But the
agreement between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy--the Triple
Entente--gave those countries a combined power which, when it came to
fixing the terms of peace, left the small allied countries of victory at
a disadvantage, and while Montenegro and Greece gained some territory,
as did Servia, Bulgaria lost what she had gained in the war. Turkey lost
90 per cent of her Empire in Europe, which so aroused the country that
the rising of the young Turks followed and the government was
reorganized. The enforced terms of settlement, however, set the little
countries at each other's throats.

The field of the Balkan battles is the very center of the world's
history. Along the Adriatic, Ionian and Agean seas are lands and
territories peopled with races that mark their ancestry back to the very
darkest ages. The protected country of Albania, with its rocky surface,
numbers among its peoples descendants of the Arnauts, whose very origin
is a mystery. They were present before the days of Greece and Rome. The
Ottoman Turks, the Bulgars from the plains of the Volga and the Ural
Mountains, the Serbs, the Roumanians, Russians, Italians, the Slavs,
Tartars.

A REGION OF MOUNTAINS.

Albania is a mountainous region along the Adriatic coast, peopled with
descendants of the ancients who maintain their characteristics. They are
said to be descendants of the Pelasgian races, which inhabited the
territory before the Greeks builded their Athens.

The Albanians are wild, daring mountaineers, and though the people have,
to all intents and purposes, been under Turkish rule for centuries, they
have never recognized the sovereignty of the Sultan. It was originally
part of the Turkish Empire in Europe, having been taken by Turkey, in
1467, and is a fertile, but wi